this problem has been in asdf "forever". i have always just patched it locally, but as i've now thrown a few things in the net which other folks should be able to build, i suggested the correction.
it might make sense to consider an entirely different protocol for constructing the component pathnames. in order to better predict the result, asdf-x tries to turn the protocol around and do it from the top down, rather always on-demand from the bottom up. the bottom-up protocol has to recurse to the root anyway in order to construct the intended pathnames.
On 2010-02-19, at 12:25 , Faré wrote:
Your fix pushed to 1.622. Oops, this is totally my fault, I kind of remember removing a similar binding from an earlier version of ASDF after a refactoring. I didn't understand the subtle way that *default-pathname-defaults* affects future make-pathname's as well as merge-pathnames.
it's not easy to follow. each runtime has its own opinion. it's not an interesting problem.